‘Extreme optimism’

PRESIDENT Barack Obama’s apathy — some might say hostility — toward business and entrepreneurship was clear throughout his presidency. His administration unleashed an aggressive regulatory assault on the private sector, and he even mocked those who risked their personal treasure to create new enterprises, implying that they owed any success to Big Government.

Say what you will about Donald Trump, but his administration has taken the opposite approach — and the results are becoming more evident every day.

As corporate leaders gathered last week in Switzerland for the World Economic Forum, they “saw relatively few threats to a rare moment of synchronized economic expansion among the world’s major economies,” The Wall Street Journal reported. And many are “crediting the administration of Donald Trump for the bullishness.”

Just three years ago, Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index revealed widespread pessimism among consumer and job creators alike. Business closures outnumbered start-ups for the first time in at least three decades. Unemployment data was distorted by a massive number of able-bodied Americans who had simply stopped looking for work.

Just a year into the Trump presidency, the American economic outlook has undergone a thorough overhaul.

“The change in the regulatory environment in the U.S. is the greatest we’ve seen in 30 years,” one CEO told the Journal. “It is hard to actually overstate how different it is when you meet with somebody and they ask what is the one regulation we can change to make your business grow more quickly?” Another business leader told the paper there is “extreme optimism” and that it is “remarkable the psychological difference — whatever you think of Trump — that he has brought.”

Economic conditions depend on a vast array of factors beyond who sits in the Oval Office, of course. But it’s hard to argue that Mr. Trump’s promotion of regulatory restraint and tax relief haven’t helped grease the country’s engines.